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Introduction
' ' Introduction The Isles of Gula Tabletop Roleplaying Game is about storytelling in the form of swashbuckling and shooting. It shares elements with D&D and other tabletop roleplays. Isles of Gula is driven by the Ocean Master’s (OM) imagination to create the cliffside cities of Tavernport or the caverns of Corgowitch, and the players have an impact too. Together you and your team will the plunder the Isles abundant treasure. ' ' In OB, players create a character and Explore, and teams up with friends, advancing tiers and plunder treasure. The adventurers can solve puzzles, talk with other characters, battle fantastic monsters, and discover fabulous magic items and other treasure. One player, however, takes on the role of the Ocean Master (OM), the game’s storyteller and referee. The OM creates adventures for the characters, who navigate its hazards and decide which paths to explore. The players decide what they want their adventurers to do. The OM determines the results of the adventurers’ actions and narrates what they experience. Because the OM can improvise to react to anything the players’ attempt, IofG is infinitely flexible, and each adventure can be exciting and unexpected. If a rule has not been written down, it’s up to the OM to decide. Every OM plays differently, and no cast is the same. The game has no real end; when one story or quest wraps up, another one can begin, creating an ongoing adventure called a campaign. Many people who play the game keep their campaign going for months or years, meeting with their friends every week or so to pick up the story where they left off. Appendix Part 1 is about creating a character, providing the rules and guidance you need to make the character you’ll play in the game. It includes information on the various races, classes, backstory, equipment, and other character abilities that you can choose from to shape your character. Many of the rules in the other parts rely on material in parts 1. Part 2 details the rules of how to play the game, beyond the basics described in this introduction. That part covers the kinds of die rolls you make to determine success or failure at the tasks your character attempts and describes the three broad categories of activity in the game: Exploration, interaction, and combat. Part 3 is a more detailed list of races, objects, equipment, conditions, and weapons in OB, and the rules for them. How to Play The play of the Isles of Gula game unfolds according to this basic pattern: 1. The OM describes the environment. The OM tells the players where their adventurers are and what’s around them, presenting the basic scope of options that present themselves (how many doors lead out of a room, what’s on a table, who’s in the tavern, and so on). 2. The players describe what they want to do. Sometimes one player speaks for the whole party, saying, “We’ll take the east door,” for example, but others normally don’t want there to be a ‘leader’ and want to discuss their options first. Normally, different adventurers do different things: one adventurer might search a treasure chest while a second examines an esoteric symbol engraved on a wall and a third keeps watch for bandits. The players don’t need to take turns, but the OM listens to every player and decides how to resolve those actions. Sometimes, resolving a task is easy. If an adventurer wants to walk across a room and open a door, the OM might just say that the door opens and describe what lies beyond. But the door might be locked, the floor might hide a deadly trap, or some other circumstance might make it challenging for an adventurer to complete a task. In those cases, the OM decides what happens, often relying on a roll of a die to determine the results of an action. 3. The OM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions. Describing the results often leads to another decision point, which brings the flow of the game right back to step 1. This pattern holds whether the adventurers are cautiously exploring a ruin, talking to a devious prince, or locked in mortal combat against a Giganteum Kraken. In certain situations, particularly combat, the action is more structured and the players (and OM) do take turns choosing and resolving actions. But most of the time, playing is fluid and flexible, adapting to the circumstances of the adventure. Often the action of an adventure takes place in the imagination of the players and OM, relying on the OM’s verbal descriptions to set the scene. OMs and Players adopt different voices for the various adventurers, monsters, and other characters they play in the game. Sometimes, an OM might lay out a map and use tokens or miniature figures to represent each creature involved in a scene to help the players visualize where everyone and everything is. Game dice The game uses polyhedral dice with different numbers of sides. You can find dice like these in game stores and in many bookstores. In this rulebook, the different dice are referred to by the letter ‘d’ followed by the number of sides: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. For instance, a d6 is a six-sided die (the typical cube that many games use). Percentile dice, or d100, work a little differently. You generate a number between 1 and 100 by rolling two different ten-sided dice numbered from 0 to 9. One die (designated before you roll) gives the tens digit, and the other gives the ones digit. If you roll a 7 and a 1, for example, the number rolled is 71. Two 0s represent 100. Some ten-sided dice are numbered in tens (00, 10, 20, and so on), making it easier to distinguish the tens digit from the ones digit. In this case, a roll of 70 and 1 is 71, and 00 and a 0 is a 100. When you need to roll dice, the rules tell you how many dice to roll of a certain type, as well as what modifiers to add. For example, “3d8 + 5” means you roll three eight-sided dice, add them together, and add 5 to the total. The same d notation appears in the expressions “1d3” and “1d2.” To simulate the roll of 1d3, roll a d6 and divide the number rolled by 2 (round up). To simulate the roll of 1d2, roll any die and assign a 1 or 2 to the roll depending on whether it was odd or even. (Alternatively, if the number rolled is more than half the number of sides on the die, it’s a 2.) The d10 Does an adventurer’s sword swing hurt a dragon or just bounce off its iron-hard scales? Will the General believe an outrageous bluff? Can a character swim across a raging river? Can a character avoid the main blast of a musket, or does he or she take full damage from the shot? In cases where the outcome of an action is uncertain, the Isles of Gula game relies on rolls of a 10-sided die, or a d10, to determine success or failure. Every character and monster in the game has stats defined by their skills. Every d10 roll that a player makes on a character’s or monster’s behalf. 1. Get the skill measure the action will be testing. Roll a d10 and add that to the relevant skill measure. 2. Apply circumstantial bonuses and penalties. A racial ability, a spell or curse, a circumstance, or some other effect might give a bonus or penalty to the check. 3. Compare the total to a target number. If the total equals or exceeds the target number, the ability check or attack roll is a success. Otherwise, it’s a failure. The OM is usually the one who determines target numbers and tells players whether their ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws succeed or fail. The OM might change the roll if it seems unreal, like if the Barbarian slams into it with his 123-pound body mass and the roll is a 1, so the door stays put or vice-versa when a scrawny priest hits the door and it blasts open. The target number for an ability check or a saving throw is called a Difficulty Measure (DM). The target number for an attack roll is called a Resistance Measure (RM). This simple rule governs the resolution of most tasks in IofG play. Adventures The Isles of Gula game consists of a group of characters embarking on an adventure that the Ocean Master presents to them. Each character brings particular stats to the adventure in the form of skills, racial traits, equipment, knowledge and magic items. Every character is different, with various strengths and weaknesses, so the best party of adventurers is one that’s diverse and which the characters complement each other and cover the weaknesses of their companions. The adventurers must cooperate to successfully complete the adventure. The adventure is the heart of the game, a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Adventures abilities a fantastic setting, whether it’s an underground cave, a crumbling castle, a stretch of wilderness, or a bustling city. It abilities a rich cast of characters: the adventurers created and played by the other players at the table, as well as nonplayer characters (NPCs). Those characters might be patrons, allies, enemies, hirelings, or just background. The Three Aspects of Adventure Adventurers can try to do anything their players can imagine, but it can be helpful to talk about their activities in three broad categories: Actions, roleplay, and combat. Actions include both the adventurers’ movement through the world and their interaction with objects and situations that require their attention. * Action: An action is the give-and-take of the players describing what they want their characters to do, and the Dungeon Master telling the players what happens as a result. On a large scale, that might involve the characters spending a day crossing a rolling plain or an hour making their way through caverns underground. On the smallest scale, it could mean one character pulling a lever in a dungeon room to see what happens. * Roleplay abilities the adventurers talking to someone (or something) else. It might mean demanding that a captured scout reveal the secret entrance to the goblin lair, getting information from a rescued prisoner, pleading for mercy from an orc chieftain, or persuading a talkative magic mirror to show a distant location to the adventurers. * Combat involves characters and other creatures swinging weapons, casting spells, maneuvering for position, and so on—all in an effort to defeat their opponents, whether that means killing every enemy, taking captives, or forcing a rout. Combat is the most structured element of an IofG session, with creatures taking turns to make sure that everyone gets a chance to act. Even in the context of a pitched battle, there’s still plenty of opportunity for adventurers to attempt wacky stunts like surfing down a flight of stairs on a shield, to examine the environment (perhaps by pulling a mysterious lever), and to interact with other creatures, players or NPCs. With these three aspects of the game, it’s up to you to earn your name immortalized in stone.